PITA 004

TOPIC 1: Remote Discovery & Framing

• Resources popping up everywhere

• There’s a lot more prep needed when doing these sessions remotely, and not enough time between meetings to do it properly

• Pre-prep - worksheets or send things in before the call, set up the Miro/Mural board ahead of time - allow for more anonymised ideas as well and a more open discussion

• Liberating structures, in smaller groups in breakout rooms

• Two facilitators - one lead, one helping, then flip

• More tiring than a normal session - split it amongst 2 days

• Schedule in time to review

• How to create serendipity

• Create happy hour, social coffee, other non-work calls

• Donut and Shuffle. Dungeons&Dragons. Board games.

TOPIC 2: Selling the value of Product in an organization that’s never had Product before (and might not understand it)

• Cost of delay/cost of team doing the wrong things

• Find the zombie features - call out the waste, quantify the cost

• Show the value of disrupting yourself

• Show the value of the product mindset

• This can be painful and take a long time - use a failure to pivot them

• If it’s too hard and frustrating, are you even in the right company? Maybe if you’re not invested in it, it could be time to leave

• Does everyone need a product mindset? Figure out the problem that they have and work from that. Continuous improvement from an iterative project perspective

• Are there any direct comparisons with competitors? Make it personal. Find case studies where product companies are winning.

TOPIC 3: Frantically Changing Priorities vs strategy

• Lots of commiseration

• Teresa Torres, Opportunity Solution Tree

• Impact Mapping

• Focus on business continuity plans - how can we hep shape these for the future?

• https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/heb-prepared-coronavirus-pandemic/

TOPIC 4: What does your Product Strategy look like

• Tech focus vs behaviour focus

• Start with vision, mission, etc

• Factor in assumptions, opinions etc from stakeholders

• Make it deliverable

• Communicate it

• Understand the org’s history - why are they organised the way they are? What are the stakeholder’s motivations/rewards?

• Separate strategy from roadmap

• Good Strategy, Bad Strategy book, https://amzn.to/2XkPPvi

  • Quote regarding bad strategy:

  • Fluff. Fluff is a form of gibberish masquerading as strategic concepts or arguments. It uses “Sunday” words (words that are inflated and unnecessarily abstruse) and apparently esoteric concepts to create the illusion of high-level thinking.

  • Failure to face the challenge. Bad strategy fails to recognize or define the challenge. When you cannot define the challenge, you cannot evaluate a strategy or improve it. 

  • Mistaking goals for strategy. Many bad strategies are just statements of desire rather than plans for overcoming obstacles.

  • Bad strategic objectives. A strategic objective is set by a leader as a means to an end. Strategic objectives are “bad” when they fail to address critical issues or when they are impracticable.

  • Rumelt, Richard. Good Strategy Bad Strategy (pp. 31-32). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

TOPIC 5: Onboarding a New Direct Report, Remotely

• Default orientation on a monday and friday

• Weekly retro

• 1:1s with lots of different people/functions set up for them, 30 mins

• Shadowing opportunities - attending, running

• Remote lunch for the practice (social)

• Daily 30 min Q&A between boss & report for the first period

• Screen sharing for collaboration/alignment

• Try and get them physical kit ahead of start date, if possible - and flowers for the first day!

• Get them to start a wiki/dictionary of terminology - and get other new starters to extend it